Season’s Greetings, and a Present for You

Keep the Command key down and tap the Tab key until you’ve highlighted the app you want to bring to the front. That app will pop to the front when you let go of the Command key. Don’t hold the Tab key down– just tap it. (Command key stays down, but the Tab key gets tapped.)

This technique lets you quickly and easily switch between apps, even if they are completely covering the screen. No more dragging windows around to make some other app visible. Just do Command-Tab until the app you want is highlighted. Then let go.

Bonus: if Command-Tab goes forward, would you expect Command-Shift-Tab to go backward? Of course you would. Turns out that Command-` (near upper left on your keyboard) will also go backward. Finally, with an app highlighted, keep the Command key down, and type a Q to quit it. There’s no quicker way.

George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
Abraham Lincoln
Theodore Roosevelt

Now suppose you want the list to look like this:

WASHINGTON, George
JEFFERSON, Thomas
LINCOLN, Abraham
ROOSEVELT, Theodore

And now suppose the list is a lot longer, and copying/pasting and selecting/formatting each name isn’t practical. This is a job for TextWrangler,* as it can do the job for you, in an instant, no matter how long the list is.

Another example: TextWrangler* can take phone numbers formatted like “xxxxxxxxxx” and change them to “(xxx) xxx-xxxx” with ease. One more example: TextWrangler* can find all of the URLs in a document and convert them to clickable links.

If part of your job involves cleaning up text files (perhaps to get them ready for a mail merge, or for importing into a database, or for publishing to the web) TextWrangler* will be a lot of help. A LOT.

• I type “;em” and as soon as I type the “m”, Typinator expands it to “macman@christianboyce.com.”
• I type “;ds” (for “date stamp”) and as soon as I type the “s” Typinator changes it to “Monday, December 29th, 2014” or whatever the current date is.
• I type “;web” and as soon as I type the “b” Typinator changes it to “www.christianboyce.com.”

It works just about everywhere– in emails, in forms on web pages, in word processing documents, in instant messages. Easy to set up, but super-powerful. You just type, using shortcuts and abbreviations, and Typinator expands what you type, as if you typed it yourself– only faster, and without mistakes. Free trial available here. Introductory movie available here.

RetailMeNot is the place to find discount codes and coupons. Make it a habit to visit RetailMeNot before making an online purchase to see if they have a discount code you can use.

The minus sign tells Google to hide what you don’t want to see. For example, a Google search for “Mac stores los angeles” returns a mix of Apple stores and MAC Cosmetics stores. Add “-cosmetics” to the end of the search string (that is, search for “Mac stores los angeles -cosmetics” and you don’t get any results about cosmetics.

Now suppose you’re searching for something that you remember reading online. You remember the website so you go to that site and use its search facility (for example, let’s say you’re looking for an article about cheeseburgers that you remember reading on www.latimes.com). If you use the “Search” box on the LA Times website and search for “cheeseburger” you will get 278 articles that match– but maybe not the article you’re looking for. If you go to Google and search for “cheeseburger” you’ll find 16.5 million articles and only some of them will be from the latimes.com website, so that’s not a lot of help. But if you go to Google and search for “cheeseburger site:latimes.com” you will get 1,960 results, all from the latimes.com site— 7 times as many articles as the LA Times search engine provided. I don’t know how Google can index the LA Times’ website better than the LA Times can itself, but it does.

Notice the syntax for restricting a search to a particular website: after you type what you’re looking for, you type a space, and then the word “site” and then a colon and then the name of the site. No spaces before or after the colon. Really handy.